By Ben.
The disappointment started at something called a Literary Fair near Stroud. Women in scarves and
bangles (some with husbands) came up the valley like the rapture and besieged this little village of
bethels and turnpike houses. They’d come to interrogate a group of self-published, local poets, and
their questions came on like rain:
How did it start? Where does your inspiration come from? When did you learn you had ‘the gift’?
The captives were not displeased with this ticketed intrusion, far from it. They discoursed floridly on
the value of their own output, treating their poems as competition jams laid out for sampling. One
credited his recent diagnosis of bipolar disorder (for which he’d paid handsomely) as the true author
of his work. The crowd was intrigued by this, but we never did hear anything he’d written. A woman
reading a poem about her chrysalis-like spiritual rebirth, gyrated, during her recitation, so erratically
with hand, arm and pashmina that we all missed the poem entirely. It shunned flight. When I did get
hold of a poem or two, I found them to be ditty-like, self-referential and – like their raucously
applauding audience – violently mobilised against anything beyond themselves. Frantic hands
clapped the airborne, moth-like meanings to dust, lest they penetrate the psyche.
Everyone colluded in the massacre, even me. I left feeling guilty, and hungry.
My disappointment, I suppose, with this mob was that they treated poems as biographies with
assonance, odes to an insulated and static worldview. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think this
makes for an interesting, relevant or effective engagement with how we perceive and deal with
reality. It was order and ornament over chaos and flux. It was poetry before the Fall; sort of innocent
and insubstantial and untravelled.
I’ve always liked Kafka’s metaphor about skilled writing being like an axe, which smashes the frozen
sea within us. It has a brutal urgency to it, akin to the non-consensual bolt a flicker of good verse can
discharge straight to the core of the listener. That’s when it starts to feel real. Objects shed their
skins and make themselves more fully known to us, with more colours and dimensions than we’d
noticed before: Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.
A million emotional miles from that Literary Fair thrives the burgeoning thoughtscape of Bristol’s
poetry scene. These pioneers are trying to reach through and beyond themselves to that which
frightens and disturbs, excites and saddens and thrills: climate crisis, gender, sexuality, falling in love
in non-binary space, micro-aggression, cynicism, intolerance, uncertainty and change. They seek a
new dialect for inherited concepts and outmoded, perhaps toxic, idioms. We hear the poems loud
and clear, their boldness, their nakedness, their incompleteness; nothing can conclude because life
hasn’t yet ended and we’re still living it. That’s where it differs from the Literary Fair poets, whom, I
suspect, felt their work, like their worlds, to be compete and perfected.
It is, I think, the incomplete, imperfect and transient quality of consciousness that makes poetry
important, even vital, as a mode of perceptual awareness. Good poetry gets us closer to the always-
evolving-thing-in-itself, never finished, let alone polished. Not ornament, but ordinary life, rescued
by the poet from the beige of inattentive half-looking, becomes charged and alive. It crackles in the
brain, fizzes on the tongue, and gushes out of you like melting ice.
Brilliant blog post